Ghost Riding

Considering the hologram-based resurrections of performers including 2Pac, ODB, and Eazy-E, Lindsay Zoladz talks with those leading the way in this uncanny new realm, and considers what it means to be immortal in the 21st century.

**“God created Ol’ Dirty Bastard,” the man himself declares in his signature warble. “His walk, his talk, his movement, his step, his feet, his everything.” This soliloquy is one of the most memorable moments in Rock the Bells, a documentary chronicling the hip-hop festival’s first show in 2004. It’s also Dirty’s only triumphant moment in the film; elsewhere he’s seen in a state of depressingly severe decline. The concert is billed as the first official Wu-Tang Clan reunion in almost a decade, but it almost doesn’t happen because Dirty is too high to make it out of his hotel room. He finally shows up at the last minute, only to spend most of the performance sitting down, uncharacteristically silent and nearly out-of-view. It would be the last time all core members of Wu-Tang performed together. Four months later, on November 13, 2004, ODB was dead.

I’m thinking about Dirty’s Rock the Bells speech nearly 10 years later as I sit in Chris “Broadway” Romero's midtown Manhattan office and watch him make small adjustments to a digital rendering of the dead rapper’s disembodied head. As Romero scans through the frames, Dirty comes to life at jilted half-speed, like a flip book. His eyes bulge, his head cocks from side to side as pixilated braids protrude like antennae, and his mouth opens and shuts, mutely miming the words to “Shimmy Shimmy Ya”.

What we’re looking at is a 3D animation of the infamous “ODB Hologram,” which made its debut at the beginning of September in L.A., as a part of Wu-Tang’s performance at the Rock the Bells 10th anniversary show. Naturally, a YouTube video captured the surreal scene: As the crowd chants ODB’s name, RZA—blurring the line between hip-hop concert and magic show—commands, “If you say it loud enough, I think he might appear.” It works. There’s a sudden, human-shaped flash of blazing blue, and then Dirty’s standing there on stage in jeans and a salmon-colored button-up, launching into “Shame on a Nigga”. One particular YouTube gawker summed up the whole spectrum of reactions: “Creepy but Awesome!!!”

(As resident comments-section scientists have nitpicked in every article about “hologram” rappers in the past year, these performances are technically not holograms but rather “holographic projections.” Romero skirts the issue by preferring the somewhat unwieldy term “original virtual performance.”)

ODB’s "appearance" only lasted about six minutes, but it was the result of nearly six months of toil. Romero—heavy-lidded, usually baseball-capped, and possessing the chill patience of an animator—is prone to working long, late hours for the gaming production company Play Gig-It, which also created a virtual performance by Eazy-E for this year's Rock the Bells. “He’ll just go in there, get in the zone,” another employee warns me in a hushed voice before I first step into Romero's office. “It gets kind of intense.”

The walls of his space are covered with printed-out photos: There’s one of him posing with 50 Cent (Romero, 36, is also the creative director of G-Unit) tacked up alongside a cartoonish digital animation of himself and 2Pac. Amidst the soft, productive chatter of clicks and keystrokes, he makes near-imperceptible tweaks to ODB's face. “It’s a constant process of getting the skin texture right, the pores, the lips. It’s something you can keep working on forever,” he tells me with an exasperated laugh. “How close can you get to what God was trying to do?”

Chris “Broadway” Romero working on a virtual Ol' Dirty Bastard

You are allowed to be freaked out. But chances are you would have been much more freaked out by all of this prior to April 2012, when a hologram 2Pac made a surprise appearance at Coachella. To the media, this was basically Year Zero for “original virtual performances” by deceased musicians.

But the recent cultural fascination with holograms did not begin (or end) with 2Pac. In April 2011, Burberry held a hologram runway show in Beijing, where models vanished into vapor in the middle of the catwalk. A hologram of Ronald Reagan was rumored to make an appearance at the 2012 Republican National Convention—and rumored to have been scrapped at the last minute out of fear that it would upstage possible real-life-reanimated-corpse Mitt Romney. A Swedish designer is developing a product called Global Chef, which would let companionless peopleprepare and eat meals with (yes, I swear) hologram projections of their loved ones (“farewell lonely cooking nights!”). As far as living musicians go, Mariah Carey and Feist have both used holographic technology to perform in multiple international cities simultaneously, and a number of K-pop artists like Psy and Girls Generation have explored the idea of virtual concerts to reach global audiences at more reasonable costs. But don’t consider the U.S. too behind the curve: Never forget Anderson Cooper’s Election Night 2008 interview with hologram wil.i.am.

Actually, this technology is starting to become so commonplace that the most notable thing about the Rock the Bells holograms is how uncontroversial they were. Reaction to 2Pac’s appearance struck a nerve with people for a number of reasons—partially because it was unannounced, but also because of the still-contentious nature of his celebrity and death. (A video titled “The Illuminiati: The Tupac Hologram Conspiracy” has been viewed over 114,000 times.) Ol’ Dirty Bastard and Eazy-E’s stories are less contentious by comparison. “With those two artists, it’s more of a love legacy thing," says Romero.

Given the unshakable ordinariness of ODB and Eazy-E’s virtual performances at Rock the Bells (both were billed beneath Kid Cudi), it would seem that hologram culture is at a crossroads. Is this a technological novelty nearing its expiration date, or did 2Pac shouting “WHAT’S UP COACHELLA?” from beyond the grave mark the beginning of a new normal?

Romero

Chris Romero’s love of hip-hop and digital art developed in tandem. As a kid growing up close to Washington, D.C., he dreamed of creating animated versions of director Hype Williams videos. His first original 3D character was created as a tribute to his favorite crew: a Wu-Tang robot with the signature W emblazoned on its chest. “I would animate him moving around and swinging his sword to different songs from Raekwon's Only Built 4 Cuban Linx...," he recalls. Discovering Wu-Tang was a personal watershed moment for Romero. "Growing up, I was one of the only Asian kids," he says. "So Wu-Tang was awesome because it fused the cultures and opened a lot of minds to hip-hop."

He studied digital art in college, but his big break—and his first encounter with what he calls "legacy work"—came in his early 20s, when he got the opportunity to create a posthumous animated video for Big Pun. Romero and Pun's Terror Squad partner Fat Joe had lengthy discussions about how to tastefully recreate the late rapper's image and do justice to his memory: "He's gotta wear the leather, he should move like this, he's gotta have TS on his hat, and you gotta have the Bentley." The result is 2001's "How We Roll", which now looks like a hip-hop add-on pack for The Sims. As with most animated videos, there’s an air of magical realism about it: My favorite part is when Pun—looking a little bit like a pixelated Botero—jumps off the balcony of a two-story mansion, does a Matrix-style spin in the air and lands in the pool below with barely a splash. In form and content, “How We Roll” is a snapshot of its time. "There's even a scene where a girl is looking at a color two-way pager," Romero laughs. "At the time, those hadn't even come out yet."

As his career began to take off, Romero's focus shifted to living artists—though their concerns were sometimes eerily similar to his legacy work. “One of the first things [50 Cent] ever said to me is that he wanted to immortalize himself through animation,” he says. Romero continued to think about paying digital tribute to dead artists, though, and at one point he was even in talks to do an animated 2Pac video that eventually fell through. Then Coachella 2012 happened. Though Romero wasn’t a part of the team that worked on the 2Pac hologram, he was thrilled to see everybody else catching up to his vision. "I was finally vindicated to the world," he says. "I was like, 'Let's take this seriously.'"

The ODB and Eazy-E holograms were not so much the work of sorcery or Frankenstein-ian corpse reanimation, but more
like the 21st-century version of Lisa Marie playing tribute
to her dad by dressing up like an Elvis impersonator.

My eyes popped out of my head Looney Tunes-style at least half a dozen times while reporting this story, but perhaps none more dramatically than when I asked Nick Smith, president and co-founder of the tech company AV Concepts, whether 2Pac was the first person he’d ever digitally resurrected from the dead. “As far as entertainment goes, this is the first deceased artist that we brought back like that publicly,” he says. “But we’ve been doing this for years. We do a lot of things for corporate—private events where the CEO that started the company comes back and talks to the sales team about where things are going today.”

There are two components of a holographic projection: the content and the technology. Smith and his team worked on the latter for the 2Pac, ODB, and Eazy-E performances, and apparently have other secret projects in development. (“I’m sure you’d love to know,” he teases.) On the phone, Smith strikes me as not so much of a Wu-Tang enthusiast as a Bill Nye the Science Guy figure—he's able explain the technology in a way that I (or a brainy child) could understand.

Though these performances might seem cutting-edge, the basic technology—an illusion known as Pepper’s Ghost—actually dates back to the mid-19th century. (Its first recorded use was in 1863, when it was used in London during a staged performance of a Charles Dickens ghost story.) The idea behind the illusion is that, depending upon the angle, a pane of glass can be both reflective and transparent. “Think of when you have something lying on the dash of your car,” Nick Smith the Science Guy explains. “The sun comes through the glass, reflects on the object lying on your dash, and if you look through your windshield you’ll see the thing floating in front of you.” That’s basically how these projections work… if the object on your dash happened to be a digital video file of ODB doing “Shimmy Shimmy Ya”; there is a mirror on the stage floor at a precise angle, and a projector shooting onto it from above.

Enter Romero and his team at Play Gig-It. While the projection’s digital assets are informed by photos and videos of the deceased artists, they are not, as some people think, archived footage of the performers, but instead original composites generated from motion-capture shoots. Eazy-E's shoot was overseen by his widow Tomica Wright, and his “hologram” is actually a composite of his three children (all of whom are rappers themselves): Eric Jr. (Lil Eazy-E) acted as the body double, Derrick (E3) provided the voice, and Erin—who bears a particularly striking resemblance to her father—lip synced Eazy’s lines to provide the facial capture. The audio and motion capture for ODB’s asset, on the other hand, was solely provided by his son Young Dirty Bastard—his dad’s spitting image in name and attitude. All of which means that these particular holograms were not so much the work of sorcery or Frankenstein-ian corpse reanimation (“To create a completely synthetic human being is the most complicated thing that can be done” is something a person actually had to clarify to the Wall Street Journalimmediately after 2Pac’s performance) but more like the 21st-century version of Lisa Marie playing tribute to her dad by dressing up like an Elvis impersonator.

The families’ support and close involvement is what set the ODB and Eazy-E holograms apart, and it’s also the aspect of which Romero is most proud. “There were tears being shed from all the family members,” he says of the L.A. performance. “The crowd was partying and enjoying it, but that was all a bonus compared to the families being affected, that emotional connection.” (“I think it’s amazing,” ODB’s mother Cherry Jones told Rolling Stone prior to the show. “I want to sing with it.”)

All this enthusiasm makes me wonder: Why hip-hop? Is it just a coincidence that the first three celebrities resurrected in this way were rappers? It feels harder to imagine such an unequivocally positive response to, say, a hologram Kurt Cobain joining his living bandmates for their upcoming Rock & Roll Hall of Fame induction (remember how heated everyone got when his likeness appeared in Guitar Hero?) The hip-hop community has always been open about celebrating its fallen stars, and in some ways this has made the dead feel more present, closer at hand. What is hologram culture if not the 2013 version of Biggie's posthumous appearance in the "Mo Money Mo Problems" video, or the glowing ghost of Eazy-E (basically a 2D hologram) in Bone Thugs-n-Harmony's "Crossroads"?

Romero's own theory about why hip-hop and holograms have gone hand-in-hand involves the genre's long tradition of repurposing technology. “Turntables weren’t meant to be scratched on,” he has said. "Records weren’t meant to be sampled. Light posts weren’t meant to be used to supply electricity for park jams.” And, it would seem, a technology developed to allow corporate CEOs to give motivational speeches from the beyond wasn’t created to pay posthumous tribute to a man who sometimes went by the name Dirt McGirt, either.

A digital rendering of Eazy-E

"I'm not sure about the hologram,” TLC’s Tionne “T-Boz” Watkins said recently, when asked if the rumors were true that she and Chili would tour with a projection of the late Lisa “Left-Eye” Lopes. As I've written previously, TLC were digital pioneers; in 2003, they performed at a Z100 concert at Giants Stadium with a huge video screen cued up so that Lopes posthumously “performed” her parts of the group’s songs. The 10th anniversary of Lopes’ death was the same month as 2Pac’s Coachella appearance, and amidst the sudden rush of TLC nostalgia, rumors began to circulate that the surviving members would be doing something similar on their subsequent reunion tour.

But for now, plans for a Left Eye hologram have been tabled. “We talked about that way before 2Pac was at Coachella,” T-Boz said in an interview with the website HipHollywood. “We use big LED screens… and it took us 10 years just to be able to look back [at the screen]. I have to have tunnel vision, because it’s a constant reminder that she’s not there.”

“So when I saw 2Pac… I felt some kinda way,” she continued. “It was so real. I don't know if I could stand next to her like that. The money's not worth what I would go through, pain-wise, so that's a big conversation we're having. Of course technology is advancing, and it looks dope, but I don't know, honestly. We gonna have to see."

Once the novelty wears off, will people actually
shell out for tickets to see virtual performances?

Still unsure about my own feelings about this new technology, I decide to see it for myself and make plans to attend Rock the Bells’ Washington, D.C., date at the end of September, which is the first time a projection of this sort is set to appear on the East Coast. During an interview over sushi with the Play Gig-It team the week leading up to the show, word suddenly comes from Rock the Bells organizers Guerilla Union that the scheduled gigs in D.C. and New York have been cancelled. A wave of bemused shock travels around the table. Romero rarely drinks anymore, but within a minute of the initial text message, someone from Play Gig-It has already ordered two bottles of sake.

It is tempting for critics to dismiss the people working on these projections as profiting off the dead, but the hologram business is not exactly a cash cow at this point. The company that made the 2Pac asset, Digital Domain Media Group, filed for bankruptcy just five months after Coachella, thwarting other holographic projects they were rumored to have in the works. It’s later confirmed, too, that Rock the Bells’ East Coast dates were cancelled due to low ticket sales. The holograms are no more to blame for this than the living artists (and maybe neither as much as the festival’s publicity team), but it’s enough to warrant skepticism: Once the novelty wears off, will people actually shell out for tickets to see virtual performances?

But plenty of people remain optimistic about what’s next for hologram culture. In an interview with Billboard last summer, Jeff Jampol, the man who manages Jim Morrison’s estate, sketched a haunting vision of the not-too-distant future: "We're trying to get to a point where 3D characters will walk around. Hopefully, 'Jim Morrison' will be able to walk right up to you, look you in the eye, sing right at you and then turn around and walk away."

Romero is undeterred by the Rock the Bells setback—the inherent riskiness of this sort of project is what drives him. “It’s like walking on the moon for the first time,” he says. “You hope it works. You hope you don’t die in front of a bunch of people. But you just go.” The last time I visit him, a few weeks after the cancellations, I ask him where this technology is headed next. He says he’s been dreaming of holograms that can “react to the crowd.”

My eyes pop out of my head once again. “Seriously? How would that even work?”

“It’ll be programmed by some kind of rule, like which side of the crowd is louder.”

For some reason I can’t really pinpoint, this seems like a bridge too far, but Romero is quick to call my bluff. He points to the phone I’ve been using to record our conversation.

“Can you talk into your phone right now? Say, ‘Hi, Siri.’”

Romero in his space at Play Gig-It

About a week later, I’m in my room trying to figure out my plans for the night. “Look up Enough Said showtimes in Brooklyn,” I say into my phone. (Keeping with one of those digital-age habits that are governed not by reason or efficiency so much as a vague sense of social norms, I still feel embarrassed talking to Siri in public but will sometimes use it when I’m alone.) The disembodied voice of a real person reads some options back to me, and then a friend and I go see the last movie James Gandolfini filmed before he died. As I watch him on the screen—at once a presence and an absence—I’m still trying to sort all of this out. I think about how his family might feel about seeing him up there, if it gives them some kind of closure or if it just prods the wound. I think about 50 Cent's desire to become “immortal” while he’s still alive. But mostly I’m thinking of a guy who changed his name to Big Baby Jesus a few years before he died, and wondering if in some corner of his wild imagination, this is what he had in mind all along.